FROM THE INDUSTRY
And closer to home? What else are you working on? The third area for us right now is automation, the management of these access networks, whether they are fibre or fixed wireless access. Automation inside the home is important; once you bring fibre and fixed wireless access to the home, even with gigabit speeds, your next problem becomes your in-home Wi- Fi network. Even if you have state-of-the- art Wi-Fi, older devices like an old robot vacuum cleaner can clog up your entire network. People typically call the operator when they have a Wi-Fi problem like this, and most cases it’s not the fault of the operators, but they get called to solve it - because who else are you going to call? How is Nokia handling this issue? We started building Wi-Fi solutions for in the home that can be managed by the operator. So, if you call the operator, they can actually see that your very old robot vacuum cleaner is consuming a lot of airtime in this frequency band and look to trouble shoot the issue. It’s good that you’re providing that visibility for your operators and the end-user. Operators can offer this type of managed service for a monthly fee and see a decent increase in ARPU from it. Other
millimetre wave antenna just to provide additional capacity for that cluster of users, for example. Fixed wireless access is also a very cheap way for mobile operators to take market share in fixed markets; those who have built a very expensive 5G network, but the profit hasn’t necessarily followed. What versatile technology. What’s the catch? The only challenge can be capacity; with the average fixed user consuming about 20 times as much bandwidth as a mobile user because you’re watching Netflix or you’re downloading games, for example. But the solution is very simple. Install millimetre antennas in strategic areas where you’re running out of bandwidth, and you suddenly get more bandwidth in that area. It works especially well if you go after underserved areas. This is clearly going to go down well. Which territories are youR FOCUS? Europe, the US and Asia are the most advanced areas and we are in the Middle East as well. In the Middle East, most of those countries are starting from mobile connectivity because they never built out cable or DSL networks, or even telephone networks. Their first introduction to telecommunication was a mobile phone. We estimate that a couple of hundred million will get fixed wireless access probably over the next 10 years.
Depending on their needs and their business case, they can select the right combination of technologies: maybe it’s GPON, XGS for residential plus 50Gbps for businesses, or maybe it’s GPON plus 25Gbps. For fixed wireless access, this will be a critical technology to get to 100% coverage. Satellite will play a part, but only for extremely remote areas - a single farm, a station in the outback in Australia will use a satellite, but not for a small village in Wales with maybe 50 homes. You can’t cover that with satellite because hundreds of people want to be online at the same time. Satellites will struggle with that level of capacity; fixed wireless access could be a nice solution. We’ve been investing a in sub-6, which is the low end of the spectrum, perfect for long distances. This is the spectrum that until now was used for mobile communication. Build one tower and you can cover an entire village or an entire rural area presumably. What about speed? The capacity is somewhat limited; it’s good coverage, but you’re not going to get very high speeds. So, we started investing in millimetre wave, which are much higher frequencies. The distances are a bit shorter, maybe half a kilometre but the speeds are up to a gigabit per second, for example. So, the combination of the two can be good where you use the lower end of the spectrum, the sub 6GHz spectrum to cover an entire area and in the spots where you have bigger clusters of users, you would build an extra
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May 2025 Volume 47 No.2
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